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By Root 1609 0

somewhat less rarefied level, the superiority of French civilization was taken for granted. Ever since Voltaire French wit had been the model for the western world. Nobody doubted that French women’s couture and cosmetics, French wine and food, were the best in the world, French (heterosexual) sex was considered the most sophisticated and adventurous, French style and taste in all these and other matters was something to which my generation inclined to defer. Even this rested on the long-established habit of turning selected superiorities of France into a general superiority supposed to be inherent in that country. We knew very well that there were a lot of things in which France was not superior. Yet our admiration for France was quite unaffected by the fact, which young men and women of my generation from North America, central and northern Europe could hardly fail to notice, that the French way of life between the wars as yet had virtually nothing to say about outdoor activities. It was not much into communing with nature. It showed no great interest in hiking, singly or in groups, mountaineering, skiing, practising, or even watching, team games; not even football. In the 1930s an ideological interest in the open air still seemed to be confined to conservatives, ranging from social Catholics to the frankly reactionary. In return, its only national grassroots sporting passion, the Tour de France of the cyclists, aroused no interest outside France except in a few bordering countries.11

On the other hand, France had one major asset. It appeared to offer its civilization to any foreigner who wanted it. It was ours to share, and we accepted it, and this not just because Mussolini and Hitler had soiled German and Italian culture – my generation would not have dreamed of vacations in fascist Venice or Rome – because British culture was too insular, and US culture visibly belonged to a different tribe from ours. The French Revolution, the starting-point of modern world history for every person on the globe with a western education, had democratized the most prestigious and exclusive of the great court cultures, and had opened the gates of a notoriously chauvinist nation to all who accepted the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity and the French language one and indivisible. In the nineteenth-century France became not only the major immigrant-absorbing country in Europe, but also – especially between the 1830 and 1848 revolutions – the welcoming refuge for international political and cultural dissidents from all of Europe. Paris was the centre of international culture, the place to be or to have been. How else could the Ecole de Paris of the early twentieth century have become possible, in which Spanish, Bulgarian, German, Dutch, Italian and Russian artists rubbed shoulders with Latin Americans, Norwegians and, of course, the native French? In no other country was the wartime Resistance movement to rely so heavily on resident foreigners – refugee Spanish Republicans, assorted Poles, Italians, central Europeans, Armenians and Jews of the Communist Party’s MOI (main d’oeuvre immigrée – immigrant labour). My own memories of Paris before going to Cambridge are of Americans in Left Bank art galleries, German surrealists in attics, the tables of the Dôme café in Montparnasse crowded with impecunious artistic geniuses from Russia and central Europe waiting for recognition. My memories after I went to Cambridge and joined the Communist Party are of meetings with anti-fascist central Europeans in the Restaurant des Balkans in the rue de la Harpe, of the international conferences, filled with Italian, German and eventually Spanish refugees, persecuted Yugoslavs, Hungarians and assorted Asian revolutionaries, for which James Klugmann mobilized his young Cambridge loyalists.

For Hitler not only made France more than ever into an international centre, but, between 1933 and 1939, into the last major refuge for European civilization and, as fascism advanced, the only surviving headquarters of the European left. Though it did not